Misjudging Ourselves and Others Under Pressure: The Hot-Cold Empathy Gap

This matters far beyond personal situations like late-night snacking or impulse shopping. The same gap shows up at work and in leadership. It affects how we plan, how we react when something goes wrong, and how fairly we judge people in difficult moments.

Cold-to-Hot: Why Plans Fall Apart

The planning fallacy is our tendency to underestimate the time, cost, effort, and risk involved in a task, while overestimating the results we are likely to achieve. The hot-cold empathy gap is one important contributor to this. We make plans in a cold state, fresh and optimistic, picturing a clean run, while failing to account for the hot state we may be in when it is time to deliver: tired, distracted, frustrated, pressured, interrupted, or dealing with unexpected problems.

One reason we ignore the worn-down version of ourselves when making a plan is that it is hard to recall and feel the visceral pull of a hot state when we are not in it. That is the “empathy” in the hot-cold empathy gap. We are not only failing to empathize with other people; we are also failing to empathize with our future selves.

Another reason is that our current mood tends to fill the screen. When we are calm and comfortable, that calm feels like reality itself. It becomes hard to believe that future anger, panic, fatigue, fear, or craving could be strong enough to override what now seems like a sensible intention. So we plan as though our future self will have the same clarity, energy, patience, and restraint that we have now.

Hot-to-Cold: Why We Overreact When Something Breaks

The gap also runs the other way. In an emergency, a hot state can take over and make us react in ways we would not choose from a calmer place. A spreadsheet error is found during a final budget approval meeting in front of stakeholders. An internal team email is accidentally sent to a client. A build breaks or a deployment fails. At that moment, threat, shame, and anger can make the incident feel existential.

This is when a leader may overreact. “Get it fixed!” becomes sharper than it needs to be. The person in the hot seat gets reprimanded immediately. The reaction feels justified because the heat of the moment makes the threat feel larger, the mistake feel more serious, and the need for visible control feel more urgent. In that state, overreaction can even feel like decisive leadership.

Later, once the updated budget figures have been circulated with a note, the client call has smoothed things out, or the patch has been deployed, the cold state returns. From that calmer place, it becomes easier to see that the situation was probably manageable without the exaggerated reaction, and without the damage to trust, confidence, and reputation that came with it.

The same overcompensation shows up in management decisions. One breach, and every system gets locked down. One bad hire, and the hiring process grows three new gates. One public failure, and a heavy new policy lands on everyone. These are often hot state decisions, made when fear is loudest. The pattern is the same as the hungry shopper, only here the stakes are people and organizations rather than a cart of food.

Interpersonal Gap: Why We Misjudge Others in a Different State

So far, we have been looking at the gap inside one person, between our own cold and hot selves. Loewenstein called this the intrapersonal gap, and it works in both directions. Looking forward, the cold, fresh self makes plans for a future hot self it cannot fully feel (the planning fallacy). Looking back, the cooled-down self struggles to understand why it reacted so strongly while it was hot. In both cases, the two selves are the same person in different states.

Loewenstein also described a second version of the gap: the interpersonal gap. This runs between people. When we are in a cold state and someone in front of us is in a hot one, we underestimate how much their state is shaping their behavior. From the outside, we cannot feel the force moving them, so we are tempted to explain their behavior as who they are rather than the state they are in. We make an unfair character judgment. This is where the hot-cold empathy gap connects with another cognitive bias, the fundamental attribution error.

This can have serious implications for leadership. Leaders fall into the interpersonal hot-cold empathy gap when they judge people who are in a hot state (stressed, afraid, overloaded, ashamed) from their own relatively cold state, and then explain the behavior as character (“they’re difficult/weak/lazy”) instead of context (“they’re under a lot of pressure right now”). The leader, observing from a relatively cold state, misreads a temporary state as a fixed trait. What begins as a gap in empathy becomes a damaging leadership habit.

Conversely, when leaders are in a hot state themselves, they may project their own urgency and emotion onto everyone around them. Loewenstein describes this as the tendency for “thirsty people to assume others are thirsty.” A leader under pressure from a slipping deadline may assume the whole team shares the same urgency. When a team member remains calm and measured, that composure may be misread as indifference (“why aren’t they worried?”). From there, the leader pushes harder than the situation requires. What feels like injecting urgency into the system may actually erode the trust of the very people who are keeping their cool.

Change agents, whether internal HR or transformation lead, or an external coach or consultant, should be alert to the interpersonal hot-cold empathy gap too. In the calm of the office, a change agent can see clearly what needs to change and draw up an elegant plan, yet still miss the emotional charge on the ground. Resistance then gets brushed off as stubbornness, politics, or lack of maturity, when it may actually be fear, fatigue, loss, overload, or mistrust.

The reverse trap is just as common. The change agent, hot with conviction, frames the change as a matter of survival and assumes everyone feels the same urgency. But the people on the ground may not yet feel the need. They may read the push as imposed, abstract, or disconnected from their reality. Either way, the plan holds up on paper and stalls in practice, because the emotional charge that will determine the change was not fully felt in the room where the change was designed.

What to Do

As with all cognitive biases, we cannot eliminate the hot-cold empathy gap completely. The focus, therefore, is on managing it, and the keys are awareness and foresight.

The gap cannot be overcome simply by deciding to be more rational or compassionate. A more realistic response is to expect that emotion and pressure will influence our judgment, then prepare for that shift while we are still able to think clearly. This means using foresight to pre-decide important responses through if-then plans, creating conditions that reduce the pull of hot states, and building in safeguards for the moments when judgment is most likely to be impaired.

Why More Empathy is Weak Advice

Encouraging leaders to have more empathy in the moment is morally right, but psychologically weak as advice. The whole point of the hot-cold empathy gap is that the other state is difficult to access. When we are calm, we struggle to feel the force of fear, anger, shame, exhaustion, or urgency. When we are in those states, it becomes difficult to recover the perspective we had when we were calm.

Empathy still matters, especially when judging someone whose emotional state differs from our own. But we should not rely on empathy alone, because the very capacity we are asking for may be least available when it is most needed. A more dependable approach is to build foresight into the way we plan and respond, preparing a set of responses in advance for the hot states we can anticipate.

If-Then Plans

The most practical tool for bridging the gap is an if-then plan. Rather than relying on a general intention such as “I will stay calm” or “I will respond with empathy,” an if-then plan identifies a likely trigger and pre-decides the response:

If this happens, then I will do that.

For example: If I spot an error, then I will breathe for one minute before responding to anyone. If a serious mistake is discovered in front of a customer or stakeholder, then I will first establish what happened, contain the immediate impact, and postpone any judgment about the person involved. If a message or email provokes me, then I will draft a reply and wait until the next morning to send it. If someone reacts defensively to the change plan, then I will first ask what pressure, risk, or loss they may be experiencing before explaining the rationale again.

This works because it does not depend on us becoming wiser once the hot state has already taken hold. Nor does it require us to feel that state in advance. It only asks us to decide, while we can still think clearly, how we want to respond when pressure arrives. The calm self leaves instructions for the pressured self.

The real challenge is using our imagination to anticipate the scenarios in which a hot state is likely to arise. This is why I suggest making if-then planning a routine, built into a regular reflection practice such as journaling. We are imperfect, and life will continue to bring mishaps, setbacks, and difficult moments. When you capture one of those moments in your journal, take the reflection one step further and craft an if-then plan for the next time something similar happens. In this way, if-then plans help us learn from experience and turn hindsight into foresight.

A Few Other Things That Help

With if-then plans at the core, apply what we learned about the hot-cold empathy gap as supporting practices:

• Plan for a bad day. Allow for fatigue, interruptions, and setbacks, not just the clean run you imagine.
• Build in slack. Add buffers, guardrails and more time than the ideal scenario requires. Set rules that block hot state decisions, preventing consequential moves until the heat has passed.
• Consider the other person’s state. Before making a rash judgment about someone, ask what’s happening to them in the background. Fear, pressure, overload, or shame may be shaping the behavior you see.

The more a fix is set up in advance, the less it depends on you staying calm.

Prepare Before the Heat Arrives

The hot-cold empathy gap is related to several other ways emotion shapes judgment, but it is not quite the same. The affect heuristic describes how feelings give something a quick positive or negative tag. Integral and incidental emotions distinguish between feelings caused by the decision itself and feelings carried in from elsewhere. Emotional contagion explains how emotions spread between people.

The hot-cold empathy gap is specifically about our difficulty anticipating how judgment changes across different emotional or visceral states, whether between our present and future selves or between ourselves and others.

For leaders, the practical lesson is not to distrust emotion, but to stop assuming that we will think and respond the same way under pressure. Notice the states at play, imagine the scenarios that may bring them out, and prepare your response before the heat arrives. A little foresight can protect the quality of our decisions, the fairness of our judgments, and the trust others place in us.

@coachtakeshi